An Ode to the “Crazy, Middle-Aged Dames” of Gena Rowlands: 1971-1977

To be Gena Rowlands is to be “an actor’s actor,” as Criterion puts it. Rowlands, acting from the 1950s into the 2010s, is one of the most influential actors to have ever lived. Her work exploring complex women is often heralded as the best of American independent cinema. Throughout her career, Rowlands always opted to take risks. When discussing her work with Duncan Campbell in The Guardian, Rowlands stated in regards to her most celebrated work A Woman Under the Influence (1974) “After John [Cassavetes] had done the screenplay for it, everyone said: ‘Why does anyone want to see a picture about a crazy middle-aged dame?’” Throughout the 1970s, Rowlands consistently played “crazy, middle-aged dames,” going against the grain of Hollywood ageism and gender politics, bringing older women to life on screen in a way that has not been seen since. So, here’s an ode to Gena Rowlands’ “crazy, middle-aged dames:” the barriers she broke, the highs she reached, the risks she took, and the mastery of her art.

PART 1: 1971-1977

In the films helmed by husband John Cassavetes and starring Rowlands in this decade, there’s a strong emphasis on the idea of losing touch with reality. Rowlands’ characters in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Opening Night (1977) feel like they exist in separate realities: museum curator Minnie Moore knows that movies have warped her perception of romance; housewife Mabel Longhetti’s ambiguous illness, or neurodivergence, often traps her within her own mind; and actress Myrtle Gordon becomes so shaken after she witnesses the death of a young fan that she begins to break down and even hallucinate. “I seem to have lost the reality of the reality,” states Myrtle, unable to get through rehearsal as she breaks down every time co-star Maurice (John Cassavetes) goes in for his staged slap. For another actress, losing touch with reality might result in a controlled performance, one that’s too neat and too clearly an act. We’ve seen women lose their minds on screen: Black Swan (2010), Melancholia (2011), The Red Shoes (1948). Especially in the genre of horror, women are built to go mad, to lose touch. Rowlands, however, refuses to make the madness of a woman a given, and rather creates intimately sympathetic explorations into the psyches of her characters. 

Minnie Moore, when compared to some of Rowlands’ other roles under her husband’s writing and direction, is a far saner character. After her relationship with boyfriend Jim (Cassavetes) falls apart due to his wife’s suicide attempt, Minnie pursues a relationship with parking lot attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel). Minnie represents a calm counter to Seymour’s wild and erratic behavior, the relationship itself mirroring Rowlands and Cassavetes’ own partnership. But Rowlands’ portrayal is a marked transformation, not just into the character’s mental state but her own physical characteristics. There’s a sparkle in Rowlands’ eyes every time she smiles as Minnie, every time she’s swept away by innocent romantic activities like seeing a movie or slow dancing in a parking lot. Every time she’s uncomfortable she dons large sunglasses, and Rowlands changes her own posture, hunching or hiding. 

But Minnie Moore is more than naive glances and scared retreats: she’s a 41-year-old woman who longs to be loved as much as the women in movies are. Though her age isn’t as large of a focus as the character of Opening Night, there is an underlying fear within her that her dreams of romance are dead. The romantic comedy, which Cassavetes subverts with this film, is built around young women falling in love, lest they become a 30-year-old spinster, doomed to a life surrounded by cats. Minnie, as a character, resents film for tricking even bright people into believing in these false ideas of love, because she herself has been tricked. She’s been tricked to believe in abuse as romance, and every time she’s pulled into trouble or hit or forced into a car, you fear for her. Old Hollywood would have you ridicule a woman her age for these things, worthy slapstick punishments for a woman who’s clearly unlovable. But Minnie gets her happy ending, her white wedding, clear tears in her eyes as she gazes upon the priest that marries her and Seymour. Her age ends up being inconsequential, as she has the family and love she long desired. 

Mabel Longhetti lives in her own reality. She loves her children, her husband, and her parents. She has nothing but love in her heart. And to most people, she’s “crazy.”

In front of friends, husband Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) insists Mabel is “unusual;” in his own home he opts to institutionalize her. Nick’s friends and coworkers fear Mabel when they visit for lunch, all becoming quiet when she expresses a desire to dance. When they all leave, her confusion is met with ire from Nick. Her desperate pleas (“Tell me what you want me to be, how you want me to be. I can be that. I can be anything. You tell me Nick”) can’t save her, only an adherence to normalcy could. And she’s not “normal.”

Rowlands was 44 at the time of this film’s release, edging closer to middle age; yet Hollywood saw A Woman Under the Influence and recognized the greatness of Rowlands’ performance. This resulted in Rowlands’ first Academy Award Nomination and her win of the Best Lead Actress – Drama award at the Golden Globes. She consistently states that this was the most challenging role she ever played, and it was a true struggle to get into the head of Mabel. The physical prowess the role required is obvious from the beginning of the film, as she zooms by on a bike packing her childrens’ things in her mother’s car, to the very end when she breaks down in her home, running from her husband and grasping a razor blade in her hand. Cassavetes, ever the director that mostly refused to direct and instead left the scene in the hands of the actors, pushed her to keep going. Telling Rowlands that she loved this part, she wanted this part, and he wrote it with her in mind, Cassavetes left Mabel in Rowlands’ hands. In this, Mabel and Rowlands are indistinguishable.

Rather than play Mabel as a frightful character, Rowlands brings out the humanity in her. Speaking about her in I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes – The Man and His Work (1984), Rowlands states “I didn’t think Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence was crazy either, where everyone else saw her as patently so.” Rather than play the character in the vein of other older women on the brink of madness, like Rowlands’ idol Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Rowlands believes not in the horror of the character or the fear she elicits in others, but that she has “a different dream, a different thing that [she] wanted.” Rowlands plays Mabel as the older woman trying in vain to be a normal housewife, a normal mother, a normal woman. Within those efforts we see not someone to be frightened of, but one to be frightened for. 

One of the earliest lines in Opening Night is said by Rowlands’ character Myrtle Gordon: “When I was 17, I could do anything. It was so easy, my emotions were so close to the surface. I’m finding it harder and harder to stay in touch.” Cigarette hanging from her mouth, Rowlands enters the screen with an aloofness, assistants stressing over her as she whispers her orders. A marked contrast from Minnie Moore and Mabel Longhetti, Myrtle Gordon has a coldness that thaws as she becomes more in touch with her emotions and less in touch with reality. Men consistently belittle Myrtle, telling her “you’re not a woman,” “you’re no longer a woman to me,” only heightening her desires to be loved in return. She longs for love, youth, a better script; and she never loses our sympathy. 

Age lies at the forefront of the narrative of the film, specifically the fear of old age potent in women and especially in actresses. Myrtle, performing in a play about an older woman in which the ultimate conclusion is that it’s not possible to find romantic love past a certain age, finds herself on the brink of self-destruction. Myrtle’s distaste for the play heightens when a young fan dies outside the theater. Nancy, obsessed with Myrtle, begins appearing as a phantom — the “first woman” to Myrtle’s second — representing youth and lust. This phantom physically attacks Myrtle and drives her mad; Rowlands carries out these physical scenes with the utmost precision, slamming herself into walls in one scene where the ghost is invisible to us.  

Opening Night released when Rowlands was 47. Though her character insists that “age is depressing, age is dull, age doesn’t mean anything,” Rowlands’ performance is paradoxical: on the one hand, she proves in fact that her age is the least interesting thing about her as a performer, and on the other, she exercises such control and power you wonder why older actresses are absent from the silver screen. Myrtle resents her role in the play, believing that if she does well, she will be doomed to be old on stage forever. In the end, she soars, giving an electrifying performance while she’s so drunk she can barely stand (Rowlands is one of the few actors that has perfected drunkenness, stumbling, and collapsing, all while being perfectly sober). Myrtle fears a future of typecasting, but in the 1980s and 1990s through the 2000s Rowlands still soared, far from the old stereotypes of mothers, grandmothers, and spinsters that plague women of a certain age in the industry.

In the 1970s, Rowlands became a neurotic queen, as this author will call it. She controlled the act of losing control, not with the utmost precision but with the freedom of movement only Cassavates allowed. Rowlands morphs into each and all of her characters; from the moment she appears on screen the audience knows exactly who she is playing, not from her wardrobe or hair and makeup, but her posture, her walk, her default facial expressions. The 1970s were a transformative decade for women’s rights, and Rowlands’ characters point to a shift in what audiences saw from women in film. In her fourth decade, Rowlands proved that youth was not the secret to great acting; rather, it’s the embrace of character and exercising of control over the art of performance that allows control over a loss of control. She was only just beginning to break the boundaries of what older women could do in film, and audiences would soon see her dedication flourish more as she aged.